Arria® V Architecture

Flexible Transceivers

Whether you need a few channels of transceivers, or up to 36, Arria® V FPGAs provides transceiver solutions to meet your performance and power requirements to deliver exactly what you need to succeed. Flexible clocking, superior signal integrity (SI), the lowest power transceivers, and the highest quantity of transceivers are only a handful of the ways the Arria V FPGAs have been designed for power-sensitive, high-bandwidth applications.

Each Arria V FPGA transceiver consists fo the Phyiscal Media Attachment, Physcial Coding Sublayer, and hardened IP blocks with added clocking flexibilities and more independent channels. Every channel has a full PMA and PCS along with a dedicated independent receive analog PLL CDR. To make it easier for designers to meet transceiver speeds up to 12.5 Gbps, drive up to 40" of backplane, and implement PCIe Gen3, Arria V GZ contains a number of additional features.

Variable-Precision DSP Block

To meet demands for higher precision signal processing, we have developed the industry's first variable-precision digital signal processing (DSP) block. This integrated block, part of the Stratix® V, Arria® V, and Cyclone® V FPGA 28-nm DSP Portfolio, allows each block to be configured at compile time into an 18-bit mode or in a high-precision mode.

With the variable-precision DSP block, the Arria V and Cyclone V FPGAs support, on a block-by-block basis, various precisions ranging from 9-bit x 9-bit up to single-precision floating point (mantissa multiplication) within a single DSP block. This frees you from FPGA architecture restrictions, allowing you to use the optimum precision at each stage of the DSP datapath. You'll also benefit from increased system performance, reduced power consumption, and reduced architectural constraints.

The variable-precision DSP block in Arria V and Cyclone V FPGAs are optimized to provide the following enhancements:

Cascade Bus

All modes feature a 64-bit accumulator and each variable-precision DSP block comes with a 64-bit cascade bus that allows implementation of even higher precision signal processing by cascading multiple blocks using a dedicated bus.

The variable-precision DSP architecture maintains backward compatibility. It can efficiently support existing 18-bit DSP applications, such as high-definition video processing, digital up or down conversion, and multi-rate filtering.

SoC FPGA Hard Processor System

Intel SoCs integrate an ARM®-based hard processor system (HPS) consisting of processor, peripherals, and memory interfaces with the FPGA fabric using a high-bandwidth interconnect backbone. The Arria® V SoCs reduce system power, system cost, and board size while increasing system performance by integrating discrete processor, FPGA, and digital signal processing (DSP) functions into a single, user customizable ARM-based system on a chip (SoC). SoCs provide the ultimate combination of hardened intellectual property (IP) for performance and power savings, with the flexibility of programmable logic.

High-Bandwidth HPS-to-FPGA Interconnect Backbone

Although the HPS and the FPGA can operate independently, they are tightly coupled via a high-bandwidth system interconnect built from high-performance ARM AMBA® AXITM bus bridges. IP bus masters in the FPGA fabric have access to HPS bus slaves via the FPGA-to-HPS interconnect. Similarly, HPS bus masters have access to bus slaves in the FPGA fabric via the HPS-to-FPGA bridge. Both bridges are AMBA AXI-3 compliant and support simultaneous read and write transactions. An additional 32-bit light-weight HPS-to-FPGA bridge provides low latency interface between the HPS and peripherals in the FPGA fabric. Up to six FPGA masters can share the HPS SDRAM controller with the processor. Additionally, the processor can be used to configure the FPGA fabric under program control via a dedicated 32-bit configuration port.

The 28 nm Arria® V FPGA family offers the lowest power, highest bandwidth FPGAs for mid-range applications, such as remote radio units, 10G/40G line cards, and in-studio mixers. A comprehensive offering of five device variants allows designers to optimally choose a solution that meets their price, performance, and power requirements. See the tables below for an overview of the Arria V FPGA and SoC family and package choices.